The general goal in this research is a vibrotactile vocoder for the perception of speech. One specific objective is to explore the degree to which tactile information processing is affected by limitations in the temporal acuity and temporal short-term memory of the skin, and the degree to which such limitations can be bypassed by the use of a scanning, or pattern-movement technique that uses spatial acuity and spatial memory to augment temporal capabilities. A second objective is to develop a coding scheme for a vibrotactile vocoder which uses in a near optimum way the information processing capacity of the skin. Toward attaining the first objective, the effect of scanning on the discriminability of one-dimensional spatio-temporal patterns will be investigated. To help attain the second objective, measurements are being made of the information processing capability of the region of interest, tentatively chosen as the forearm, using waveforms other than sinusoidal. In most previous work with tactile vocoders, the frequency variable has been encoded into only a spatial variable. We will also explore the simultaneous use of stimulus frequency information.